Gnome-Files on XFCE? Huh!
Gnome-FIles on XFCE? What type of madness is this?
I know right.
Then why? Isn't it the worst file-manager?
Well, Nautilus ( I am going to refer Gnome-Files as Nautilus in this article ) is nowhere near worse. Let me explain.
Nautilus uses something called "metatracker" ( now tracker, for file-indexing ), which uses metadata to locate files throughout the system. You can add "tags" as well to the files, this would free you from organizing your folder list.
People may say that strigi,recoll,baloo, etc also use metadata. Well, I am not denying it. What they can't do is crawling through unorganized lists in a proper way. Nautilus' search indexing is the fastest in the list of GUI File-Managers.
**Need some more explanations? **
Nautilus uses something called GIO (gnome-input/output) to process the requests. Now, the specialty in this is, it uses single API calls for both remote and local files. This means no back-to-back calls to slow the system down. This not only increases the robustness of FTP connections using Nautilus but SFTP/WebDAV/Samba and etc. would be equally robust.
In the worst-case scenario, tracking the file would hardly take 5-7 MB of RAM, hence no pressure on the system.
While I do believe that every piece of software has its pros-and-cons and the same goes for Nautilus. However, I don't support the idea of completely bashing a piece of software. The reason being, there's a lot of effort put behind every piece of software that's out there, and the community can only grow and attract more people when we'll stop being harsh towards each other. Don't like it no problem, politely disagree and decline. If possible, then provide some suggestions.
Peux OS does
come with Thunar as well, no restrictions, it has good features too.
You can replace both thunar and nautilus with something else, after all,
it's Linux and we have plenty of file-managers to choose from unlike
WIndows ;)
Want me to change the default FM? Sure, if you provide a detailed enough explanation of the GUI FM that you opt-for and has better indexing than Nautilus, then I can consider it.
Side-Note: Thunar uses "GVFS" which is a gnome-component to manage remote-fs/trash among few other things.